EXPERIMENT 21:

Not too long ago, in one of the backgammon discussion forums, somebody
asked what would happen if one of the players always made the second best
move. After my fartoffski cube skill experiments, I thought it may be time to
do some mutant checker play experiments and thought that an experiment
to answer this curiosity question.

To isolate checker skill, both sides make cube decisions according to GnuBG
3-ply cube level. GnuBG makes best checker moves at 3-ply.

For checker moves, mutant calls GnuBG's "hint" function at 3-ply level, and
makes the 2nd best play from the legal moves list. Sometimes there is only
one forced move and it becomes also the 2nd best play. Sometimes there
are no legal moves and mutant skips a turn.

After 20,000 games bot won 46,782 (92.54%) and mutant won 3,773 (7.46%)
of points; bot won 18,840 (89.71%) and mutant won 2,160 (10.29%) of games.

As I stated above, this experiment wasn't done to prove anything but only to
find out the answer to a curiosity question. However, the results may be more
meaningful in comparison to other past of future experiments. I will comment
on those if and when I may draw some consequential conclusions.